Numerous designs and implementation of swept source optical coherence tomography (OCT) and other interferometric optical imaging and ranging systems exist today. The receiver systems used today consist mostly of a single or dual-balanced signal detector to detect a signal that is then digitized and processed to produce ranging and imaging information. Multichannel systems can perform polarization sensitive (PS) OCT or phase measurements or functional imaging on Doppler imaging signals. However, both the single channel systems and the multichannel systems suffer from receiver designs that are overly complex, unreliable, non-manufacturable, or expensive. A simple, compact, manufacturable receiver architecture to allow for the many configurations designed for swept source OCT (SS-OCT) systems is needed. This disclosure describes an improvement over these prior art technologies.